Baking Goods At Home: 5 Helpful Tips On How To Bake A Homemade Bread
Are you up in the mood to make some DIYs at home that involve food? Get yourself out of the couch now and start learning and practicing how to bake homemade bread! Aside from the enjoyable and delightful experience of the process of baking, you can also get to smell and taste the aromatic and delectable outcome of your homemade bread.
Plus, if you make and bake them successfully, you may proudly share them with your loved ones. Of course, before getting ahead on your baking activity, you must first ready yourself, the necessary and needed ingredients, and the essential baking tools that you would use. To help you begin, here is a list of few tips on how to bake bread at home:
Choose a Bread Recipe to Start With
Before you start your baking activity, you must first decide what type of bread you want to bake. There are numerous kinds of bread that you can make at home, and each kind differs in recipe and ingredients. When deciding, you may opt to practice making your all-time favorite type of bread. Or, if you are up for experimentation that involves Science, you may start with making an artisan sourdough bread.
Artisan sourdough bread is one of the bread varieties that you can make using only three main ingredients that include flour, water, and salt. This bread is healthier than most bread because it has probiotics that are good for your stomach. To know more about sourdough bread, you may visit the website of Foodal.com for more facts.
Prepare The Ingredients
Have you heard Aristotle’s famous quote, “the whole is greater than the sum of its part?” This classic line also applies in the process of baking bread. Any kind of bread is made of different single ingredients mixed to form a bread dough. In making a piece of sourdough bread, you will need only three ingredients, including flour, water, and salt.
Do The Mixing Process
When all your ingredients are ready, you must now prepare yourself to start the baking activity by following the procedure in making the dough. Different bread types have different baking procedures, but in making a sourdough bread, which needs a long fermentation to make, you have to be patient and allocate some of your time waiting.
Sourdough bread takes approximately five days to make. On the first four days, you have to prepare and feed the levain. To prepare the levain, you have to mix 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water in a glass. Cover the mixture with a dry and thin towel, and wait until the third day to add another mixture of 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water. You have to continue adding flour and water every day until the fifth day.
On the fifth day, when your levain is ready, you may now start the dough-making. Mix the levain, 100 grams of water, and the flour and leave the mixture for an hour. After that, add another 100 grams of water and flour, mix them, and wait for another 30 minutes. Sprinkle some salt to the dough, squishing it in using your fingers.
When you are satisfied with your squishing, you can now stretch and fold the dough. Make sure that you stretch and fold all the corners of the dough. Do it four times every 20 minutes for 2 hours. After the final stretch and fold, leave your dough for another 3 hours. When the 3 hours is over, collect your dough into a ball and place it into a floured towel on a breadbasket. Let it rest again for 3 hours.
Bake It!
To bake bread and pastries, we need to have a well-functioning oven. In baking your sourdough bread, you have to preheat your oven, as well as the baking tray that you will use, up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the baking tray is preheated, you may remove it from the oven and place the dough on it. Make a few slices on the top of the dough.
Put the baking tray back into the oven but before closing the oven door, toss some chunk of ice on the oven floor to create some extra steam. Reduce your oven temperature to 475 degrees Fahrenheit and bake your sourdough bread for 35 minutes or more until you feel that the bread is fully baked.
Cool and Serve
Some kinds of bread are great to eat after they are out of the oven, but sourdough bread needs 10 to 15 minutes of cooling time before it can be served. It would be best if you wait for the bread to cool completely before slicing it so that the starch completely gelatinizes itself into the final form. When your sourdough bread is completely cool, you can now taste and share it with your loved ones.
Takeaway
The process of making and baking sourdough bread is quite challenging and time-consuming. But it is worth the experimentation. You might not get the bread done perfectly on the first try, but the more you practice, the more you learn and make adjustments until you get your desired texture and taste.